T h e explosive growth in global networking infrastructures has created the opportunity t o construct systems involving large number of independent and widely-distributed computational components. A dministrative and operational autonomy considerations imply that the actual establishment of agreements regarding all aspects of component interaction m u s t be explicitly declared and eflectively formed. Moreover, since agreements m a y evolve over time, their representation needs t o be highly tailorable. Design autonomy considerations imply the need t o interoperate between pre-existing components, yet n o t enforce a fixed interoperability standard. T h e H A D A S system addresses both concerns by providing a model and a corresponding programmable interface t o component interoperability. Specifically, it provides a n integration framework in which components"live", a peer-based configuration model f o r forming agreements and interconnections between components, and a coordination language for explicitly programm i n g the actual desired distributed computation using these components.T h e framework rests o n a n underlying reflective object model that supports mutability and mobility, and a n infrastructure that provides object interconnectivity, security and persistence. H A D A S i s fully implemented in Javaand comes with a full programming environment f o r developing and executing network-centric applications.

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